Escalating his administration’s response to the disastrous Gulf oil spill, US President Barack Obama planned to announce yesterday that a moratorium on new deepwater oil drilling permits will be continued for six months while a presidential commission investigates, a White House aide said.
Controversial lease sales off the coast of Alaska will be delayed pending the results of the commission’s investigation, and lease sales planned in the Western Gulf and off the coast of Virginia will be cancelled, the aide said on condition of anonymity before a midday Obama news conference.
Those steps, along with new oversight and safety standards, are the results of a 30-day safety review of offshore drilling conducted by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar at Obama’s direction.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Salazar briefed Obama on its conclusions on Wednesday night in the Oval Office, the aide said.
Meanwhile, the US Coast Guard has pulled commercial fishing boats from Gulf of Mexico oil cleanup efforts in Breton Sound off the Louisiana coast after several people became ill.
The Coast Guard says crewmembers on three vessels reported nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains on Wednesday afternoon. Four people were hospitalized, including one who was flown to a hospital.
The Coast Guard told all 125 commercial vessels that were helping clean up spilled oil to return to shore. Medical workers evaluated the crewmembers as a precaution.
Breton Sound is about 50km southeast of New Orleans.
BP executives were waiting yesterday to find out if the risky “top kill” procedure — pumping heavy mud into the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico — was having some success.
If it stops the flow, BP would then inject cement into the well to seal it. The top kill has worked above ground but has never before been tried 1,500m beneath the sea. BP pegged its chance of success at 60 to 70 percent.
If not, the company had several backup plans, including sealing the well’s blowout preventer with a smaller cap.
An earlier attempt to cap the blowout preventer failed. BP could also try a “junk shot” — shooting golf balls and other debris into the blowout preventer to clog it up — during the top kill process.
A permanent solution would be to drill a second well to stop the leak, but that was expected to take a couple months.
In related news, a storage tank that spilled crude oil from the trans-Alaska pipeline on Tuesday, shutting down the line, was the site of a fire three years ago for which Alyeska Pipeline Service Co faces fines of US$506,000.
Alyeska continues to contest the proposed fines for safety violations connected to the fire at Pump Station 9.
Up to several thousand barrels of crude spilled from the pipeline on Tuesday into a 8.7 million liter storage tank, which overflowed into a containment area. The containment area, a yard lined with an impermeable barrier and surrounded by a berm, apparently captured all the oil.
Alyeska has proceeded cautiously with cleanup.
Spokeswoman Michelle Egan said she could not predict when the pipeline might be restarted as the company assessed risks.
Oil companies operating on Alaska’s North Slope were ordered on Wednesday afternoon to further reduce production, from 16 percent of their regular output to 8 percent.
Alyeska has storage capacity for that production until noon today, Egan said, and it’s possible pumps on the main pipeline could be restored by then, allowing oil to flow at regular levels.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not